258 No god but God
considerations be determined by the citizens of the Islamic state. For
as Abu Bakr so wisely stated upon succeeding the Prophet, Muslim
allegiance is owed not to a president, prime minister, priest, king, or
any earthly authority, but to the community and to God. As long as
these criteria, which the Prophet established in Medina nearly fifteen
centuries ago and which the Rightly Guided Caliphs struggled in
their own way to preserve, are satisfied, then what form the Islamic
state takes is irrelevant.
So, then, why not democracy?
Representative democracy may be the greatest social and political
experiment in the history of the world. But it is an ever-evolving
experiment. These days there is a tendency to regard American
democracy as the model for all the world’s democracies, and in some
ways this is true. The seeds of democracy may have been sown in
ancient Greece, but it is in American soil that they sprouted and flour-
ished. Yet precisely for this reason, only in America is American
democracy possible; it cannot be isolated from American traditions
and values.
The fact is that the vast majority of the more than one billion
Muslims in the world readily accept the fundamental principles of
democracy. Thanks to the efforts of Modernists like Muhammad
Abdu, most Muslims have appropriated the language of democracy
into Islamic terms, recognizing shura as popular representation, ijma
as political participation, bay‘ah as universal suffrage. Democratic
ideals such as constitutionalism, government accountability, plural-
ism, and human rights are widely accepted throughout the Muslim
world. What is not necessarily accepted, however, is the distinctly
Western notion that religion and the state should be entirely separate,
that secularism must be the foundation of a democratic society.
Islam, as Sayyid Qutb aptly noted, has always been more than reli-
gion; it is, in al-Afghani’s observation, civilization. It is the dynamic
conviction that a person’s spiritual and worldly responsibilities are one
and the same, that an individual’s duty to the community is indistin-
guishable from his or her duty to God. From the creation of the first
Islamic civil order in Medina, Islam has endeavored not merely to
prevent vice but to encourage virtue, not merely to satisfy the needs of
the people but to satisfy the will of God. And since a state can be con-